The Relationship Between Acute Exercise Intensity And Inhibitory Control In College Students

Fast pace of modern life leads people rarely have the time and energy to participate in aerobic exercise. At the same time, physical and mental health risks are becoming increasingly prominent, and even changes in brain structure occur which will lead to function decline. Since the “Exercise is medicine” proposed, more and more researches focused on how exercise promote mental health, especially acute aerobic exercise, which is suitable to conduct intervention experiment in laboratory and better to explain the causal relationship between exercise and mental health. Inhibitory control is important for people’s daily life and mental health. Numerous studies have indicated that acute aerobic exercise can promote inhibitory control. So whether various intensities of acute exercise can promote inhibition? If not, which aerobic exercise intensity can extremely promote inhibition? What is the relationship between exercise intensity and inhibition? These questions can provide suggestion for exercise prescription.The study aims to investigate the effect of different intensities of acute exercise on inhibitory control from behavioral and electrophysiological characteristics and explore the cognitive process and brain activities in order to make out whether there is a regular dose-response relationship between intensities and inhibition. If exists, inverted U hypothesis or drive theory. 100 inactive in exercise college students were randomly divided into four group, including three exercise intervention groups and one reading control group. Behavioral data and event-related potentials(ERPs) were recorded after subjects completing one intensity acute exercise or reading through the adapted Go/NoGo task. The results showed that:(1) Three exercise groups exhibited higher response accuracy than reading group, especially moderate intensity exercise group(p<0.001).(2) Compared to Go condition, NoGo condition exhibited higher N2 peak amplitude, N2 latency, P3 peak amplitude and P3 latency(p<0.001).(3) The P3 d mean amplitude were higher in low intensity and high intensity groups than that in control group(p=0.01; p=0.032). Compared to low intensity, moderate intensity exhibited higher P3 d mean amplitude(p=0.019).The conclusions were: Acute aerobic exercise can promote inhibitory control. There is an inverted-U relationship between intensity and inhibitory control.